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S.D. Tar Sands Oil Spill: Bad Omen for Keystone XL Safety

The sales pitch on new tar sands pipelines is like a song stuck on repeat: our pipeline is the safest, most state-of-the-art way to get oil from point A to point B. Companies seeking to win approval from states and the federal government make all kinds of estimates and promises about how safe their new pipelines will be: they’ll hardly ever leak, the leaks will be small, our detection technology will catch spills as soon as they happen!

The beleaguered Keystone tar sands pipeline pipeline with its alarming history of spills, provides a far more truthful view of reality. When the Pipeline and Hazardous Materials Safety Administration (PHMSA) provided a special permit for TransCanada’s Keystone pipeline back in 2007, they gave the company the right to push oil through at pressures equivalent to 80% of the stress level the pipeline could tolerate before deformation or failure. Regulations typically limit this stress level to 72%, but PHMSA felt at the time that its operating conditions would “provide for more inspections and oversight than would occur on pipelines installed under existing regulation.” This special dispensation meant that TransCanada could operate the Keystone pipeline at 591,000 bpd, instead of the 435,000 bpd nominal capacity that the pipeline was designed to operate at if a special permit hadn’t been granted.

Even as the Keystone pipeline has experienced spills far beyond what TransCanada assured people wouldn’t happen, other problems have plagued the pipeline. In October 2012, after just two years of operation, TransCanada shut down the whole Keystone system for immediate repairs due to safety issues that were not immediately disclosed. Years later, documents obtained via the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) showed that Keystone was suffering severe external corrosion, with portions of its nearly brand-new pipeline already whittled down to the thickness of a fingernail. As with the prevalence for major leaks, this kind of issue wasn’t supposed to happen and opened up a whole slew of new concerns over the safety of operating tar sands pipelines at high pressures.

Which brings us to Keystone’s most recent spill and a host of new details that have emerged now that PHMSA has issued a corrective action order. Three things in PHMSA's order stand out as cause for major alarm in this latest, and, by far, largest spill for the Keystone pipeline:

The amount of oil. Last month’s incident was 12.5 times larger than previous major spills experienced by the Keystone pipeline, and has been estimated at 210,000 gallons.

The potential size of the rupture. TransCanada detected the spill via its pipeline monitoring system at 5:33am and began shutting down the line at 5:36am. That means the pressure differentials in the pipeline varied so much so quickly that TransCanada was sure they had a leak on their hands (in previous instances, for example, TransCanada did not detect the leak and a passerby’s reports led to the pipeline being shut down). This suggests a major pipeline failure, not the kind of pinprick leak that the pipeline experienced just over a year ago.

A major design flaw. Initial observations suggest that the cause of the latest Keystone rupture was damage to the pipeline during construction. This damage was caused from the installation of weights that were used to keep the pipeline underground in areas where it passes through heavily saturated soil (local landowners reported remembering that TransCanada had a hard time keeping Keystone from floating back to the surface when they were building the pipeline).

But the Keystone spill may prove to be even worse for TransCanada than people think. South Dakota regulators are considering pulling permits that allow TransCanada to operate the Keystone pipeline within their state. Their interest and concern with the issue suggests that the permits TransCanada holds for Keystone XL in South Dakota might also be looked at with a fresher eye. Which makes sense. Claims of safety and estimates of spill incidence on a pipeline that is essentially a bulked-up twin of the existing Keystone pipeline need more careful scrutiny. Keystone XL crosses numerous water bodies, travels through areas with aquifers incredibly close to the surface, and carries a substance that should never come anywhere near water. If tar sands oil cannot be moved safely by pipeline, the public needs to know and regulators need to start taking a look under the hood of these projects to fully comprehend the level of risk they pose to our communities and our environment.